Ted Hughes and the corpus of Sylvia Plath

Criticism, Wntr, 1998 by Sarah Churchwell

And I am the cargo

Of a coffin attended by swallows.

And I am the water

Bearing the coffin that will not be silent.

--Ted Hughes

It is Plath's (Medusan) speechlessness that is the deadly, punishing

weapon.

--Janet Malcolm

1

When Sylvia Plath killed herself, soon after composing a cycle of poems that evoke suicide, she seems to have raised the stakes of the literary venture for many of her readers. Howard Moss, Plath's poetry editor at The New Yorker, once declared: "I don't think morbid fascination accounts for [Plath's] special position. The energy and violence of the late poems were acted out. What their author threatened she performed, and her work gained an extra status of truth. The connection between art and life, so often merely rhetorical, became all too visible."(1) Insisting that a threat must be "performed" in order to be true, Moss's statement demonstrates a persistent anxiety, even (or especially) on the part of professional poetry readers, that poetry may in fact be inconsequential, that it requires "an extra status of truth" to buttress what otherwise is "mere rhetoric." Evaluating poetry by the degree to which it is "performed" is a precarious position from which to defend it. But the demand for the "extra truth" of fact has, in the case of Sylvia Plath, also resulted in heated debates over the boundaries between fact ("truth") and fiction.

A statement that attempts to maintain a distinction between Plath's poetry and her life, such as Elizabeth Hardwick's "in her work at least, [Plath is] never a `nice person,'" is offset in the same article by assertions that entangle Plath's life, work, and biography: "in Sylvia Plath's work and in her life the elements of pathology are ... deeply rooted" and "an early dramatic death gives one, in a literary sense, a real life, a throbbing biography."(2) The problematic nature of biographical "truth" in Plath studies has resulted in a widespread assumption that to study Sylvia Plath's writings is to "take sides" and be "for" Plath or "against" her. The next step is often unspoken, but it is crucial: if a writer is sympathetic to Plath, that writer is understood definitionally to be antagonistic to Ted Hughes, Plath's estranged husband at the time of her death, her literary heir and executor, and for some, at least, "Plath's greatest critic, elucidator, and (you could almost say) impresario."(3) If nothing else, the presumption that to be "for" Plath is to be "against" Hughes oversimplifies Hughes's own, very ambivalent, very painfully and painstakingly elaborated version of Sylvia Plath. But one reason for this presumption may be Ted Hughes's insistence on the final authority of his own interpretations of Plath. Preemptively disavowing the very public nature of Plath's writings (she doggedly sought publication for virtually everything she wrote), Hughes's writings on Plath foreclose the possibility of rethinking Plath's words; they insist that he alone can author her accurately. To write on Sylvia Plath is, according to Ted Hughes, to join "the wretched millions who have to find something to say in their papers," it is to participate in the commercialistic "re-invention" of Hughes's own "private experiences and feelings."(4) The confusion seems to arise from Ted Hughes's refusal to be textual subject, rather than author, of writings about Sylvia Plath. Ted Hughes writes about Plath as if his readings are definitionally textual rather than biographical and others' readings are biographical rather than textual.

Ted Hughes's writings consistently emphasize his own role in Plath's story, with two contrasting effects. Maintaining the centrality of his position, Hughes's writings encourage readers like Janet Malcolm, in her book The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, to grant him definitionally the "last word" in Plath studies. In discussing Plath's poetic "breakthrough," Hughes certifies his reading on the basis of having married Plath: he says that Plath's "real self had showed itself in her writing" and that this self was "the self [Hughes] had married, after all, and lived with and knew well."(5) But while for some readers stressing his relationship to Plath gives Hughes's writings authority and sympathy (Malcolm, for instance, considers him a "victim and a martyr"), for other readers such an emphasis opens the door for a reexamination of that role. What exactly do his words claim, and what seems to be at stake in those statements? While Hughes's insistence on the primacy of Plaths wifely, domestic, and physical identity in his interpretation of her writing is probably unsurprising, its effects are far-reaching. Establishing a reductively gendered reading of Plath's texts, Hughes's conflation of her written and lived selves also results in a failure to distinguish between his own written and lived selves, and ushers in the kinds of "attacks" on Hughes that Janet Malcolm declares have "buried him alive."(6) This essay examines Hughes's writings on Plath while trying to maintain a distinction between the lived and the written self, to find a space between a total collapse of the two and a pietistic claim to pure separation. But Hughes's writings on Plath take a large part in a very public debate, and have never been treated as an oeuvre in their own right, a "body" of writings with a distinct narrative which themselves contend with Plath's writings for the right to author both Plath's and Hughes's written lives. Perhaps most crucially, this essay will endeavor to refuse the terms set by both Hughes's writings and The Silent Woman, and will attempt not to equate the living Ted Hughes with his written words--even as those words tend to equate Sylvia Plath with hers. Malcolm claims that "the warily silent Ted Hughes" cannot have his words used against him, but Hughes has been no more "silent" than Sylvia Plath, the "silent woman" of Malcolm's title.(7) In exploring the conditions of Ted Hughes's putative "silence," this essay will examine only the debate that surrounds Plath's name without attempting to read her own writings.(8)